


all the redemption i can offer

by jugheadjones



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Feelings, WARM AND SOFT, dont dream its over, self indulgent fluff, sleepy fred, weight loss mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-29 21:14:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14481309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jugheadjones/pseuds/jugheadjones
Summary: It's three am and it's raining and Mary Andrews is back in the small town she grew up in, laying next to the man who used to be her husband.And everything is the same except for the way Fred looks at her.





	all the redemption i can offer

Fred loves the rain at night. Mary loves the way he falls asleep to the rain, breath soft and even under it, the mattress barely dimpling under his little weight, the tense lines of his body relaxing completely. The rain is a sharp series of staccato drum-beats on their roof and windowpane, but he doesn’t wake. Fred doesn’t relax very often. Mary loves to see him like this: face smooth and unworried, eyelids lightly shut, drooling on himself. 

They love these things the way they don’t love each other, not anymore. 

He’s sleeping on his back now, one arm lying up next to his face so that the inside of his wrist shows vulnerable to the ceiling, the other hand sprawled out across his flat stomach. With the duvet down around his lower legs, the worn out Riverdale U shirt he still wears to bed is fully visible, his half of the sheet no doubt crumpled in a sweaty ball somewhere at his toes. 

She can’t see his feet but she assumes at least one of them is bare: as long as they have been married, Fred has been going to sleep in socks and waking up without them. Fred’s a tosser and a turner, and the bottom of his T-shirt has rucked up almost to his bellybutton, the rain on the window throwing patterns on his skin. He looks like an overgrown college kid, exhausted from a long day of studying. Mary has to smile at it. 

She’s been home in Riverdale for two days, and this time they hadn’t even bothered to try fumbling out sleeping arrangements. Mary had headed straight upstairs and set her suitcase on her old half of their marriage bed, and neither Fred nor Archie had said boo. Archie, admittedly, had other things on his mind - she worried about him, more now than ever, with this Hiram business. She knew Fred was worried too. It was one of the million conversations they had to have when he woke up - when the rain stopped and their life-after-the-divorce went on. 

But right now he’s asleep, and it’s raining. 

It takes her back to the early days of their marriage, the wet summer Archie had been teething, the nights when Archie was a little boy that Fred would come in damp from walking the dog and press his wet toes against her shin. Fred could conk out in three-point-five seconds in those days, could collapse snoring mid-sentence while Mary lay there wondering how he did it. It’s harder for him now. She’d seen it during the Jason Blossom mess and she sees it still now - insomnia dragging lines into his face, burrowing purple stains under his eyes. He had come to bed an hour before her and had still been awake when she slipped in beside him, eyes closed to feign sleep but without any attempt to be convincing. 

Mary loves and has committed to memory the way Fred sleeps: somehow deep and light at the same time. Even now she knows if she jostled him hard enough he’d wake straightaway, despite the heaviness of the rise and fall of his chest. His face is pale in the blue-light of three-am, looking soft and gentle and exposed in the bed they’ve owned since they moved in, the one spot in the house that holds all of their memories. She looks at him and feels a tenderness spread out from her ribs all the way down into her arms, gaining depth as it goes. 

Mary pulls the duvet up over him now, watches him murmur happily, toss over onto his side and melt into the sheets. His deep breathing doesn’t abate, the loudest sound in their room beside the rain. If she closes her eyes, it’s like they’re still married. Like they’d never split. Like they love each other still. 

She watches his back instead, the prominent ridges of his spine, how the fabric hangs loosely on his slender frame, the slip of his neck where the baby hairs have gone long enough to curl. His sleepy bedhead is exceptional. Fred needs a trim and a good ten pounds on him. Mary edges closer and slips an arm around him so that his warm breath sighs steadily against her arm. Ten pounds. Maybe fifteen. 

He’s small: she can touch her palm flat to his chest and feel bone. Her whole arm fits around him without trying. Soon he squirms away from her, flopping under her arm onto his back and then rolling away with his spine to her, making small pained noises as if he’s dreaming. Mary takes her arm off and rubs hard circles at his shoulder blades until he calms. That feels better. Far more platonic. Fred settles and she lets herself relax. 

“We were supposed to get fat together,” she says, still absorbing the smallness of him. She squeezes his little shoulder, warm from the sheets. “That was the plan.”    
  
“Face it,” he says sleepily, his back to her, half of it stifled in a yawn. She hadn’t realized he was awake. “We suck at planning.” 

He’s right of course. They always have. 

“Is it time to get up?” he asks the blankets. She knows he could. The light-sleeper half of him could: he has years of early mornings on the construction site to help. He’d get up and make her pancakes. They’re small-town stock, both of them. That’s what small-town people do. It’s what her parents used to do. Eggs, pancakes, bacon, coffee.  _ I love yous  _ over the morning paper. 

“No,” she says, doesn’t tack  _ sweetheart  _ on there, even though she wants to. “Go back to sleep.” 

He does. Yawns and kicks his sock off and cuddles up to the duvet. Sleeps. Quickly. The way she remembers.

When he’s asleep again she gets up and paces around the room. Everything is the same here as before she left. Maybe a little dustier. Alice Cooper would have a fit, she thinks, and smiles. How strange it was to think about that again. 

Mary cracks the closet open. Her suitcase fits perfectly into the space she had left void two years ago, but Fred’s suitcase has not moved. Fred’s suitcase has never moved. Fred has never gone anywhere. 

Mary closes the closet and stands watching the rain. 

Sometimes she thinks she made the wrong decision. Sometimes she knows she made the right one. Her hesitance is not about having left for Chicago, but more so to do with the divorce papers they still haven’t signed. Her friends are starting to ask her why. Why the process is moving at the speed of molasses. Why she can’t rip the band-aid off. 

The duvet is slipping down Fred’s body again. She pulls it up to his chin and tucks him in tight. 

_ I think I still love you _ , she doesn’t say. _ I think that’s why. I think I leave you here and I go away but I don't stop wanting this. Not the marriage, but this. The people we are when we sleep together in the rain.  _

She watches the rain until it slows down. Fred’s body has kept the sheets warm so that it’s like crawling back into an oven when she finally joins him again. His breathing is even beneath the rain, soft and deep and calm. She falls asleep to it, keeps a prudent half-foot between them on the mattress, but lets their feet brush together whenever he changes positions. 

They get up at six. Fred wakes all at once, yawning enormously as he rolls over toward her, his warm brown eyes flickering open just in time to meet her own. He seems momentarily surprised to find himself cocooned in the sheets and duvet, and Mary has time to think and regret that he must be very used to having no one to re-roll him when he kicks his sheets off; must be used to waking up cold. 

“Hey, pretty lady,” he says, and for some reason it makes her want to cry. 

“Hey yourself, tiger,” she says, because for some reason they’re even better at flirting now that they have no cause for it. Fred grins at her, his bedhead so bad now that it’s drooping down over his eyebrows. He pushes himself up on one skinny forearm and yawns. 

“Still raining?” 

“No, it stopped.” She wonders if she can convince him to let her trim the hair at the back of his neck over breakfast. Remembers with a weird pang the adoring way he used to look at her, like she put the stars in the sky. They need each other still, care about each other still, love each other in the utterly platonic way of closest friends. But that look is gone. She’ll never see it again. 

“I love when it rains at night,” he says sleepily, sitting up and stretching so that his t-shirt falls loosely back into place. Mary lays on her side and tries to live in this in-between space for awhile, the one where they are divorced and they’re not. Doesn’t tell him that she knows  _ damn well  _ that he loves it when it rains at night, because he’s been telling her that for twenty-five years.  Doesn’t tell him that she loves the way he falls asleep in the rain when it does, the way the lines of him relax. 

She thinks about breakfast. Pancakes, probably. Eggs, bacon, coffee. They’re small-town folk for today. Maybe she can put something back on the bones of him, build him up even a little. Pretend at something that's almost there, silvery and vapid-invisible in the space between them, like the sheen on the pavement in a downpour. Be Fred-and-Mary again, the people who sleep together in the rain. 

“Get up,” Mary says, and listens to the eavestrough drip off the roof of the house. “We need to get you something to eat.” 


End file.
